Off-by-none: Issue #249

October 3, 2023

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Hello AWS, it’s me, Cloudflare! 👋

In our previous issue, Off-by-none celebrated a milestone, AWS threw more cash at AI, and Ampt officially launched! This week, Cloudflare raises the bar again, AWS hits Bedrock, and MongoDB drafts a key player. Plus, we have lots of great serverless content from the community!

Also, welcome to all the new Serverless Status subscribers! I loved that newsletter as much as all of you and am sad to see it go. I appreciate their recommendation that you join us here, and I hope you find this newsletter gives you an adequate weekly dose of serverless.

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

So there is a lot to get to this week! It was Cloudflare’s Birthday Week and they delivered a stunning number of features and services. Where to even start? D1 is now in open beta, they introduced Vectorize, a vector database for shipping AI-powered applications, and they launched Hyperdrive, which makes database connections over 20x faster.

They also introduced new Workers pricing so you never pay to wait on I/O again, got rid of CAPTCHAs, and announced that Sippy helps you avoid egress fees while incrementally migrating data from S3 to R2. Plus, they announced a WinterCG spec for a Socket API that works across JavaScript runtimes, enabled Puppeteer on Workers, and are bringing AI inference to the edge. Your move AWS!

Speaking of AWS, they had some pretty big announcements of their own. Amazon Bedrock is now generally available (some more details here), AWS Application Composer now supports all 1000+ AWS CloudFormation resources, and AWS App Runner added support for Monorepos.

But the two I think are super exciting are that DynamoDB global tables is now available in all AWS Regions and support for incremental export to S3 for Amazon DynamoDB. These open up a lot of possibilities.

In some other cloud news, Digital Ocean launched its Managed Kafka Service, Confluent launched a serverless Apache Flink service, Microsoft announced a New Azure SQL Database free offer in Public Preview, and MongoDB is taking Atlas to the Edge (sort of).

Also from MongoDB, Jim Scharf is joining as Chief Technology Officer. That could be interesting.

Finally, in case you missed CDK Day last week, all the recordings are now available:

• CDK Day 2023 – Track 1 (English)
• CDK Day 2023 – Track 2 (English)
• CDK Day 2023 – Track 3 (Spanish)

Serverless Concepts 🏗

World of serverless: AWS Lambda & EventBridge
Quick overview from Wojciech Lepczyński of some use cases made possible by these two awesome AWS services.

Avoid Common Pitfalls with Serverless Architecture – Expert Tips
Sam Williams gives a lengthy treatise on the pros and cons of using serverless architectures. Lots of good information in here, though I think many of the “pitfalls” can be mitigated if done right.

Measuring Java 11 Lambda cold starts with SnapStart – Part 7 re-measuring
Questions about SnapStart? Just ask Vadym Kazulkin.

Leveraging serverless web sockets with AWS Lambda and API Gateway
Serverless WebSockets are a thing and Răileanu Alex gives you a high-level overview of how they work.

Optimizing Lambda coldstarts
David Behroozi takes you through a number of experiments to minimize cold starts. This is a great read.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Lots of great tutorials this week. Here are a few interesting ones:

• Getting started with Xata by Aadarsh Kannan
• “Managed” 3rd Party API Rate-Limiter in AWS
• Serverless development with Amplify Studio by Jones Zachariah Noel
• Serverless Internationalization by Lee Gilmore
• Automated Personal Information Extraction from Driver’s License Using Amazon Textract by Sushanta PaudelAnd a few Amazon Bedrock tutorials for good measure:
• Creating a Simple Chatbot with Context on Amazon Bedrock by Renaldi Gondosubroto
• Bedrock unveiled: A Quick Lambda example by Antonio Lagrotteria
• Build Serverless Generative AI API Service With AWS Lambda and Amazon Bedrock

Serverless Reads 🤓

LLMs Demand Observability-Driven Development
Charity Majors argues that LLMs are not deterministic, so trusting them to deploy applications means that your observability in production better be ready to handle it. I think there needs to be guardrails, but who knows what people might do?

AWS re:Invent Serverless | Amazon Web Services
Danielle Heberling shares her AWS Heroes guide to serverless sessions at AWS re:Invent.

United States Auto Club: Cloud Application Development in the Fast Lane with Ampt
We published another case study, this time with a pretty exciting customer who has a need for speed. 🏎️

Influence, Credibility and Following the Yeses
Benjamen Pyle shares his thoughts on the notion of influence. Having the ability to affect change is an awesome power, be sure to use it wisely.

Size is (almost) all that matters for optimizing AWS Lambda cold starts
This is a great post by Adrian Tanasa that walks you through a number of experiments to test how package size affects cold starts.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

AWS Amplify Studio + GraphQL | Serverless Office Hours
Erik Hanchett joins Julian Wood to dive into how you can use Studio with Form Builder, Figma to Code UI generation, and Data Manager with GraphQL.

How to load test serverless applications like a PRO
Yan Cui shares another excellent video that gives you some tips and tool recommendations for load-testing serverless applications.

AWS Lambda: how to be a GOOD citizen and NOT BREAK downstream systems
Another video by Yan Cui that explains how to constrain Lambda function concurrency so we don’t overwhelm downstream systems.

DX 2023 – Brian LeRoux: Rethinking Developer Experience
Brian shares his thought on the intersection of developer experience and user experience and how good software development outcomes don’t require tradeoffs that negatively affect the consumer.

Data Streaming Patterns
Marcia Villalba teaches you some useful patterns for building data streaming solutions including change data capture, message and content filters, the normalizer pattern, and log capture.

AWS Bites #97: Configuration for AWS Applications (Env vars, SSM, Secrets Manager, AppConfig)
Eoin and Luciano walk you through the forest of configuration management on AWS.

New from AWS 🆕

Not to be outdone by Cloudflare, AWS had several other announcements that you might find interesting. It’s only the beginning of October, and it looks like the re:Invent firehose of releases is already starting.

• Announcing AWS Amplify JavaScript v6 developer preview
• Amazon CloudFront announces security recommendations
• Amazon OpenSearch Service now supports OpenSearch version 2.9
• Amazon MSK adds support for Apache Kafka version 3.5.1
• Amazon MSK now supports fully managed data delivery to Amazon S3 using Kinesis Data Firehose
• Amazon SQS announces Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) for scalable access permissions
• AWS WAF now supports JA3 Fingerprint Match
• AWS Global Accelerator now supports endpoints in four additional AWS Regions
• Amazon OpenSearch Service now provides improved visibility into Auto-Tune actions
• Amazon MQ now supports RabbitMQ version 3.11.20
• Amazon OpenSearch Service version 2.9 expands geospatial aggregations support
• Analyze multi-account app health with CloudWatch Application Insights
• Amazon EMR Serverless introduces application-wide default job configurations
• Amazon S3 now provides the Last-Modified time for delete markers using S3 Head and Get APIs
• Amazon SNS now supports AWS CloudTrail data event logging for the Publish and PublishBatch API actions

Serverless Tools 🛠

Lambda Peeler: Streamlining AWS Lambda Management
Web dashboard for managing AWS Lambda functions and layers

ServerlessSpy
CDK-based library for writing elegant, fast-executing integration tests on AWS serverless architecture and an additional web console to monitor events in real time.

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

October 20, 2023 – ServerlessDays Cape Town

October 26, 2023 – EDA Day Nashville

October 26, 2023 – Serverless Summit Hamburg

November 27 – December 1, 2023 – AWS re:Invent 2023

Serverless Star of the Week ⭐️

This week’s star is Kirk Kirkconnell (@NoSQLKnowHow). Kirk is a Lead Developer Advocate at Momento and a NoSQL expert. Before Momento, he spent several years as a Developer Advocate for DynamoDB, as well as some time as a product manager for Redis. You’ll find Kirk sharing his serverless, NoSQL, and caching knowledge on Twitter and the Momento blog and YouTube channel. If you reach out directly, he might also share his extensive knowledge of tractors with you. Thank you Kirk for continuing to educate the community.

Final Thoughts 🤔

Woah, this was a long one! The serverless space is on fire right now, and with more serverless database offerings and AI options popping up every day, things are about to get even crazier. Strap in, because the next two months will be intense.

See you next week,
Jeremy

I hope you enjoyed this newsletter. We’re always looking for ideas and feedback to make it better and more inclusive, so please feel free to reach out to me via X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, or email.